Some Wayland residents will have the opportunity to vote on reforming Massachusetts legislative stipends in the upcoming Nov. 3 general election. The nonbinding public policy question for precincts 1 and 4 in the 13th Middlesex District asks voters whether the district’s representative should be instructed to vote for legislation or rules reducing the House Speaker’s and Senate President’s control over extra pay for state legislators. It also asks if stipends should be limited to lawmakers who perform significant extra work that is transparent and accountable to the public.
As a nonbinding public policy question, the vote serves as an expression of voter opinion and will not have a binding legal effect on the state.
The legislative stipend question appears on ballots in eight Massachusetts districts, including the 13th Middlesex District—which encompasses parts of Concord, Lincoln, Marlborough, Sudbury and Wayland—along with the 14th, 15th, 20th, 25th, 29th and 32nd Middlesex districts, and the Barnstable, Dukes, and Nantucket representative district.
A representative in the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office explained that ballot questions appear in specific districts because a petitioner can choose to target certain areas, or voters within a district might canvass for signatures exclusively in their own towns.
Massachusetts state lawmakers receive leadership and committee stipends in addition to a base salary of $82,046, according to the MA 2025–26 Almanac published June 7. Roughly three-quarters, or about 149 out of 200, of Massachusetts lawmakers receive some form of stipend ranging from $7,000 to $119,000.
According to the almanac data:
• The Senate president and House speaker receive the highest stipend at $119,632, bringing their total annual compensation to roughly $201,678.
• Chairs of the House and Senate Ways and Means committees receive stipends of $97,201.
• Majority and minority leaders receive stipends of $89,724.
• Committee chairs, vice chairs and assistant leaders receive stipends ranging from roughly $8,000 to $52,000.
• Rep. David Linsky of the 5th Middlesex District earns a $22,000 stipend, while 13th Middlesex Rep. Carmine Gentile receives $7,000.
Two grassroots watchdog organizations leading the reform effort — the Legislative Effectiveness and Accountability Partnership, or LEAP, which was created by the Coalition to Reform Our Legislature, and Act on Mass — point to a pattern of taxpayer-funded compensation for inactive roles. The groups regularly cite that more than one in five legislative committees did not hold a single hearing or consider any bills during entire legislative sessions. CROL also states that the centralization of this power allows the speaker and senate president to act as a “managed hierarchy,” rewarding compliant lawmakers and sidelining independent voices.
“Legislators in Massachusetts are financially dependent on leadership, and dependency breeds deference,” said LEAP signer Jonathan Hecht, a former Democratic lawmaker from Watertown. “Legislators wait to be told what to do. Acting openly and independently risks losing significant income.”
In an Aug. 6, 2025, press release, Mass GOP Finance Chair Jennifer Nassour supported the measure, stating, “We need to remember that these legislators are elected by the people and their salaries are paid by our tax dollars. This would both save taxpayers $500,000 a year by capping the number of stipend positions and the size of individual stipends and empower legislators to work for the people they are elected by.”
Both Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ronald Mariano defended the current stipend system in earlier statements. Spilka’s office issued a statement for the Boston Globe Aug. 5, 2024, story, “the Senate makes decisions about committee leadership based on individual members’ unique experience, knowledge, and interest.”
Mariano defended the system by outlining a corporate-style hierarchy in an August 2025 interview with the State House News Service.
“Every organization, the longer you’re involved, the more work you do, and the higher responsibility you have, you get increases in pay,” Mariano said. “And I think it’s one of the ways to keep people thinking about this job as a potential career.”
Retiring 13th District Rep. Carmine Gentile opposed the strategic value of the measure for the district. “The simple truth is that compelling your representative to vote against leadership on something like this would immediately make her/him/them a legislator incurring the wrath of many powerful House members,” he said. “That would make it infinitely harder for the representative to pass legislation and get budget earmarks for the district.”
Gentile added that effective lawmaking on Beacon Hill requires knowing when to support leadership, noting that every roll call vote proposed by the speaker over the past 12 years has enjoyed a supermajority of support, typically 110 votes or more, with only one simple-majority exception.
“This ballot question may be popular and obtain a majority vote … but should this question pass, it will not make government more transparent,” Gentile said. “What it will do is tie the hands of any future Middlesex 13th legislators in 2027 and beyond.”
Gentile noted that while California utilizes a system where only a handful of legislators receive significant stipends and most chairs receive equal base pay, any similar transition in Massachusetts must be driven internally by the members. He added that the state constitution grants both legislative chambers control over their own rules, and a formal constitutional amendment requires favorable votes by the House and Senate in two consecutive sessions followed by a statewide ballot.
Rep. Linsky of the 5th Middlesex District declined to comment on the merits of the proposal, stating only, “That question is not on the ballot in my district—that’s the other Wayland district.”
Unopposed 13th Middlesex District Democratic candidate Ravi Simon did not respond to the Post’s request.
LEAP recommends establishing active thresholds for stipends tied to performance requirements, capping stipends, altering leadership pay structures, and enforcing public transparency.
The path to placing the question on the ballot has faced significant legal hurdles. The current push stems from actions taken by LEAP Chair John Lippitt in 2025 and 2026. A petition containing 96,797 signatures was filed with the Clerk of the House of Representatives on Jan. 7 and formally presented to the legislature in March after meeting the constitutional requirements.
However, opposing legislative leaders requested an advisory opinion from the Supreme Judicial Court regarding the constitutionality of the stipend-related reforms. The high court’s advisory opinion concluded that the proposal functioned as an internal legislative rule rather than a statutory law, placing it outside the legal scope of a standard ballot question.
All Wayland residents may have an opportunity to vote on binding stipend reform in 2028 if a new proposal qualifies for the ballot.
